Melissa Eleftherion's Blog, page 9
April 9, 2018
5/30: her story is your story is my story
her story is your story is my story
her story is your story is my story the axes we intersect, collide, ruminate, devise the branches we extend to heartache to the larynx to the mouth humans in our filth and consequence partially digested morals and transformative butt yoga we allied in flesh and rattles a kindred of sextants making sense of pecuniary disease a systemic longing for connections when criminal justice is criminal warfare and we are all under this rock heaving against it with our might intact and our eyes xanthic with exhaustion. we are in this radial of desire we dichroic points & light when we turn we turn together and that’s where we’re going
April 5, 2018
4/30 calcite
calcite
in the cavities i’m colorless
hot like a rotting tooth
i become new forms
concretion among the fading druse
vitreous as cut glass
i effervesce
but how i fracture
is witness
to all that petrifying
April 3, 2018
3/30: chalcedony
chalcedony
the gentle subtlety of true light breaks
arrests then aggregates radiating
how the glow extends to us despite our faults
crystal life system your gap symmetry a balance of victories
moss agate, the nacreous imagine, stalactite, a petrified wood for lovers
how you hover as forms
in the interstices
warrior, queen
your magnanimity
a wonder seeking air
April 2, 2018
2/30: Aurostibite
Aurostibite
i’m not radioactive
there’s a horizon over my grimace
lead grey no gammas protuberant teeth
the sonogram catches my gravity
diploidal i’m a star symbol a fracture among the shimmer
my crystal system two Ty fighters on the wind
a metallic streak
Au get off my diaphaneity
What I lack in sulfur I make up in cell dimension
666 – mark of the beast
Good luck finding my cleavage
1/30: rock beach
rock beach
we dig for ancestors
of, relating to, or tending those hard, dark rocks
opaque in their soliloquies always why me why me why
we coax time from their celestial bodies
our instruments gaining measure in the
massive bed of (p)latitudes
January 23, 2018
sexual predators in pobiz & new life for my field guide to autobiography
CW/TW: sexual abuse, broets, pobiz bullshit
If you’re one of the two people who read this blog (hi, Mom!), you might know that my book, field guide to autobiography, was orphaned back in October due to the press’ publisher being outed as a sexual abuser. As a survivor of sexual violence, a staunch women’s rights advocate, & a human being with a brain who believes women, this was triggering on many levels.
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When I found out, it was a week after the Mendo Lake Complex Fires, & I was on a bus home from Oakland where I had been doing a reading & classroom visit at CCA. I’m wearing a mask and I’m feeling such rage. I’m thinking of betrayals and rape culture and the woods and I’m listening to Black Hole Sun and remembering the toxic aftershocks. Memories I’ve trapped in amber all these years. So – after crying for about an hour while somehow also listening to 90s rock, I wrote to the publisher & withdrew my book.
For several months, I distracted myself with family & work obligations, & tried to work through some of this rage at the gym, all while mourning & feeling pretty cagey about trusting another publisher with my work.
A few weeks ago, I delved into editing and revising my manuscript-in-progress (which is largely about rape culture & sexual predation of teen girls), little ditch, & excised half of it, rendering a chapbook-length manuscript which I later submitted to above/ground press. Feeling the momentum from that accomplishment, I decided to submit field guide to a few presses I had carefully vetted (though, the vetting wasn’t new – I thought I had carefully vetted the previous publisher as well). Well….
This story has a happy middle. I found out just last week that both field guide to autobiography & little ditch will be published by The Operating System & above/ground press, respectively. I’m so thrilled, & grateful to both Lynne DeSilva-Johnson & Rob McLennan for being such stalwart, literary citizens & for helping to restore my faith in poetry world. Hooray for great publishers who actually give a damn about the work! Hooray for not needing to spend 5 hours proofreading my manuscript because the publisher kept introducing weird errors & errant phrases during every iteration! Hooray for a true collaboration! I’m stoked.
Oh – there have been these two new, wonderful reviews published about field guide:
This one in Publisher’s Weekly & this gem from Mariel Fechik in Glass
Stay strong, friends.
December 28, 2017
August 7, 2017
Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange Open Reading Period
Every Her Dies, Jennifer MacBain-Stephens
*****DEADLINE EXTENDED*****
Open Reading Submission Period: June 1st – August 10th
The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University invites emerging and established poets to submit work to the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange. The PCCE began as a community-curated chapbook archive created in 2010, by poets recommending other poets using an each one-invite one model. See http://poetrychapbooks.omeka.net Since 2014, the PCCE has developed from an invite-only model to an inclusive fee-free open reading period.
We aim to provide and maintain open access to small-press and out-of-print chapbooks to promote readership of contemporary poetry as well as encourage its value and availability for use as free, educational, teaching resources. Send us your work that plays, sings, risks, interrogates, provokes, and moves beyond.
Guidelines:
Length: 10-40 pages
Currency: New work (written within the last 5 years); published work that’s fallen out of print.
Aesthetics: seeking a range of forms, approaches, hybrids.
There is no reading fee!
Please email submissions to chapbookexchange@gmail.com.
Feel free to visit our archives: https://poetrychapbooks.omeka.net/
May 30, 2017
new reviews of field guide to autobiography
for so long, i doubted my first book would be published – sending work out, bracing myself for the inevitable rejections, polishing the manuscript, sending it back out into the world. doing that thing many poets do where you just keep plugging away, despite the sense of defeat that nips at you, the voice that whispers mean nagging things. that voice needs to die. we are all of us worth it. if you believe in your work, eventually someone else will too. let this be a reminder to keep going.
i’m thrilled that two fellow poets took the time to write such insightful reviews about my first full-length collection, & am so grateful to Jennifer Martelli and Rob McLennan for reading the work with such precision and care.
http://momeggreview.com/2017/05/29/field-guide-to-autobiography-by-melissa-eleftherion/
https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2017/05/melissa-eleftherion-field-guide-to.html
